The need to store, manipulate and transmit package level detail is becoming increasingly important in the package transportation industry, especially as new sortation technologies and processes are developed. The volume of packages grows exponentially each year, along with customer requirements for greater package tracking and faster delivery. These factors present an ongoing challenge to shippers throughout the country and shippers work continuously to automate the sortation process to meet this challenge. Much of the success of this effort depends on the shipper's ability to acquire enough detail to effectively route packages through the sortation system and ultimately, onto a shelf in a package car.
A critical stage in a package delivery system is the pre-load sortation of packages that occur at a carrier destination facility. Pre-load sortation is a process in which carrier pre-loaders load packages onto delivery vehicles for delivery to the ultimate destination. A carrier destination facility generally has a plurality of package cars that are pre-loaded simultaneously and each package car has a variety of potential load positions. Pre-loaders have the responsibility of ensuring that the packages are loaded on the correct shelf of the correct package car and, to date, this process has been manual. Pre-loaders physically examine the destination address on the package label and determine from memory or from written pre-load charts, which package truck delivers to that address and which shelf on the truck holds the packages for that address. This is a complex task and requires that pre-loaders receive extensive training on how to properly load packages. Not surprisingly, the manual intensiveness of this pre-load process causes errors in pre-loads and increased training costs. In today's environment with high turnover rates, the increased training time negatively impacts the ability to create and sustain a workforce capable of providing quality loads.
Dispatch plans are integrally related to the pre-load process. In general, a dispatch plan is the schedule or route through which a carrier assigns work to carrier service providers (such as package car drivers) to efficiently coordinate and schedule the pickup and delivery of packages. Dispatch plans are well known in the carrier industry and are used daily by commercial carriers to manage driver delivery routes. Dispatch plans are also integrally tied to the pre-load process as a pre-load depends in large part on the dispatch plan assigned to the delivery vehicles that are loaded. Because pre-load handling instructions are based upon a dispatch plan, significant changes to a dispatch plan often resulted in changes to the pre-load process. Because the pre-load processes known in the art are knowledge-based, a carrier is limited on how often it can change a dispatch plan without disrupting the pre-load process. This inflexibility in dispatch planning results in inefficient delivery routes and untimely deliveries.
A need therefore exists in the industry for a system that automatically generates pre-load instructions for packages in a pre-load. The presentation needs to be sufficiently simple to understand that an inexperienced pre-loader can correctly perform a pre-load.
Another need that presently exists is for a system that captures and electronically provides package destination address information at the carrier destination facility. A pre-load system configured to provide handling and pre-load instructions for a package necessarily requires the package destination address information to generate the handling instructions.
Still another need exists for a system that automatically updates a pre-load scheme based upon a change to a dispatch plan.
Thus, an unsatisfied need exists for improved systems for handling package pre-loading operations that overcomes deficiencies in the prior art, some of which are discussed above.